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Roderick Williams’ and Julius Drake’s English Winter Journey seems such a perfect concept that one wonders why no one had previously thought of compiling a sequence of 24 songs by English composers to mirror, complement and discourse with Schubert’s song-cycle of love and loss.

Opening night at the Metropolitan is a gleeful occasion even when the
composer is long gone, but December 1st was an opening for a living composer who
has been making waves around the world and is, gasp, a woman — the second woman
composer ever to have an opera presented at the Met.

The Feast at Solhaug : Henrik Ibsen's play Gildet paa Solhaug (1856) inspired Wilhelm Stenhammer's opera Gillet på Solhaug. The world premiere recording is now available via Sterling CD, in a 3 disc set which includes full libretto and background history.

For an opera that has never quite made it over the threshold into the ‘canonical’, the adolescent Mozart’s La finta giardiniera has not done badly of late for productions in the UK. In 2014, Glyndebourne presented Frederic Wake-Walker’s take on the eighteen-year-old’s dramma giocoso. Wake-Walker turned the romantic shenanigans and skirmishes into a debate on the nature of reality, in which the director tore off layers of theatrical artifice in order to answer Auden’s rhetorical question, ‘O tell me the truth about love’.

Heading to N.Y.C and D.C. for its annual performances, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra invited Semyon Bychkov to return for his Mahler debut with the Fifth Symphony. Having recently returned from Vienna with praise for their rendition, the orchestra now presented it at their homebase.

Igor Stravinsky's lost Funeral Song, (Chante funèbre) op 5 conducted by Valery Gergiev at the Mariinsky in St Petersburg This extraordinary performance was infinitely more than an ordinary concert, even for a world premiere of an unknown work.

On Tuesday evening this week, I found myself at The Actors Centre in London’s Covent Garden watching a performance of Unknowing, a dramatization of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben and Dichterliebe (in a translation by David Parry, in which Matthew Monaghan directed a baritone and a soprano as they enacted a narrative of love, life and loss. Two days later at the Wigmore Hall I enjoyed a wonderful performance, reviewed here, by countertenor Philippe Jaroussky with Julien Chauvin’s Le Concert de la Loge, of cantatas by Telemann and J.S. Bach.

Here is one of the next new great conductors. That’s a bold statement,
but even the L.A. Times agrees: Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla’s appointment
“is the biggest news in the conducting world.” But Ms. Mirga
Gražinytė-Tyla will be getting a lot of weight on her shoulders.

Macabre and moonstruck, Schubert as Goth, with Stuart Jackson, Marcus Farnsworth and James Baillieu at the Wigmore Hall. An exceptionally well-planned programme devised with erudition and wit, executed to equally high standards.

On November 20, 2016, Arizona Opera completed its run of Antonín Dvořák’s fairy Tale opera, Rusalka. Loosely based on Hand Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, Joshua Borths staged it with common objects such as dining room chairs that could be found in the home of a child watching the story unfold.

If there was ever any doubt that Puccini’s Manon is on a road to nowhere, then the closing image of Jonathan Kent’s 2014 production of Manon Lescaut (revived here for the first time, by Paul Higgins) leaves no uncertainty.

Many opera singers are careful to maintain an air of political neutrality. Not so mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, who is outspoken about causes she holds dear. Her latest project, a very personal response to the 2015 terror attacks in Paris, puts her audience through the emotional wringer, but also showers them with musical rewards.

I wonder if Karl Amadeus Hartmann saw something of himself in the young Simplicius Simplicissimus, the eponymous protagonist of his three-scene chamber opera of 1936. Simplicius is in a sort of ‘Holy Fool’ who manages to survive the violence and civil strife of the Thirty Years War (1618-48), largely through dumb chance, and whose truthful pronouncements fall upon the ears of the deluded and oppressive.

For its second opera of the 2016-17 season Lyric Opera of Chicago has staged Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in a production seen at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino and the Grand Théâtre de Genève.

I first reviewed Goerne’s interpretation of Die schöne Müllerin in 2000, a revelatory experience in that his was the first version of this work which seemed to belong more to the world of Winterreise than to the gemütlichkeit with which Schubert’s first Müller song cycle is generally associated. In conversation a couple of years later on, he gave his view of the work — “All this naïveté — the boy walking through the trees finding love and all that, is not what the work is about; it is much, much more involved with what might be called ‘Sturm und Drang’” — and he regarded the songs after ‘Pause’ as ‘a descending spiral for which the only culmination is death by suicide.’ Judging by this evening’s performance, he has now decided that the descent begins much earlier than that.

Goerne has at times appeared to shop around for his accompanists, seemingly in a quest to find the one who most nearly comes close to his own unique concept of Lieder. Previously it was Eric Schneider who filled that role, but in Christoph Eschenbach he seems to have found the ‘Seelenfreund’ whose playing is, if anything, even more rapt, mesmerizingly slow and intense than his singing. If ever a singer and pianist were as one in their freedom from the constriction of the bar lines, then these two are.

This is the ultimate serious This is the ultimate serious Schöne Müllerin, barely leavened with a touch of lightness — all the humour is sardonic, all the beauty deceptive, all the tempi so slow as to seem at times in danger of standing still. Of course I loved every phrase, but I can quite see that for many, this is not “their” Schöne Müllerin — for that, you need to go to Quasthoff or just about any other Lieder singer around today. barely leavened with a touch of lightness — all the humour is sardonic, all the beauty deceptive, all the tempi so slow as to seem at times in danger of standing still. Of course I loved every phrase, but I can quite see that for many, this is not “their” Schöne Müllerin — for that, you need to go to Quasthoff or just about any other Lieder singer around today.

‘Das Wandern’ is not a jolly romp but prefigures what is to come — within the subtle variations of “vom Wasser” and “Wandern” we are made aware that this is not a frolicsome lad but one whose ultimate fate is to be in thrall to an illusion — the spirit of that other deceptive piece of “rural idyll” Tennyson’s ‘May Queen’ seems to hover over us throughout — “They say he’s dying all for love, but that can never be: / They say his heart is breaking, mother — what is that to me?” Goerne seems to have decided that the crucial turning point in the cycle comes much earlier than generally supposed — here, with the line “Ist das denn meine Strasse?” sung in tones of suppressed fear and anguish, we are virtually in suicide land with the second song.

The wonderful ‘Danksagung an den Bach’ is so often sung as pretty ditty, but here we had frank, straightforward questions about the speaker’s future, culminating in superficial yet ultimately doomed exuberance. I have never heard ‘Der Neugierige’ performed with such intensity — singer and pianist united as if in prayer, the little questioning phrases after “ob mich mein Herz belog” played almost in a reverie, “die ganze Welt mir ein” taken so slowly that it became a kind of litany. I need hardly add that the earth stood still as far as most of the audience were concerned, but I can quite see how some might find it a little, shall we say, over-wrought?

‘Eifersucht und Stolz’ like most of the more vigorous songs was taken at a cracking pace, the diction at “da steckt kein sittsam Kind den Kopf zum Fenster ‘naus” remarkably crisp despite the speed, and this was followed by a ‘Die liebe farbe’ only just short of psychotic — the amount of sheer hatred packed into the seemingly innocent line “mein Schatz hat’s Grün so gern” had to be heard to be believed.

The bleakness never really lets up, ‘Trockne Blumen’ touching new depths of the most profound sadness, no triumph at “der Mai ist kommen” instead only the sense that the coming of May is cruel in the same way as Eliot’s April is, because it brings the Spring and hope so welcome to all but the poet. The final “lullaby” was again taken at a “slow and stopping pace” and some of the words were a little mangled in the process — indeed, scrupulous though his concern for the language is, Goerne does have a tendency, alarming to those of nervous disposition, to be somewhat free with what goes where in a song. One could put this down to his fervent intensity getting the better of him, since it cannot surely be lack of familiarity with the text.

Goerne says that “People always think of Winterreise as being dark, gloomy, but the man does not die at the end, he goes on, unlike the youth” (in Die schöne Müllerin). Indeed, and the wanderer’s “Nun weiter denn, nur weiter” of the later work seems positively rosy-cheeked cheeriness compared to this miller lad’s desire to weep the green grass “ganz totenbleich.” One anticipates Wednesday’s Winterreise and Saturday’s Schwanengesang with eagerness tempered with apprehension — this first installment of Goerne and Eschenbach’s interpretation of these works (recorded on Harmonia Mundi, and soon to be followed by further discs) promises evenings of an intensity as troubling as it is breathtaking.